Marco Rubio as the anti-Mitt Romney

His desperate need for a drink of water created the immediate headline, but Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) much-anticipated speech Tuesday night had a very serious intent: It was as much an exercise in erasing Mitt Romney’s legacy on the Republican Party as it was a traditional response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.

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Rubio delivers Republican rebuttal

Rubio can't stand the heat during GOP rebuttal

The selection of Rubio to speak for his party marked the latest, and perhaps most overt, step in the GOP’s rehabilitation project since Election Day, an effort to repackage its identity without altering its policies.

And at four separate moments in his remarks, Rubio went to great lengths to get the message across: The GOP isn’t the party of rich white guys.

Right from the start, the 41-year-old Cuban-American stated bluntly that he was no senator’s (or governor’s) son.

“I didn’t inherit any money from them,” Rubio said of his parents. “But I inherited something far better — the real opportunity to accomplish my dreams.”

In another stark reminder about the extent to which Obama defined Romney and the GOP last year, Rubio even went through a litany of the ways in which the president caricatures Republicans and ended with the Democrat’s most effective argument.

“[H]is favorite attack of all is that those who don’t agree with him — they only care about rich people,” the senator lamented, before reaffirming his working-class credentials.

“Mr. President, I still live in the same working-class neighborhood I grew up in,” he said. “My neighbors aren’t millionaires. They’re retirees who depend on Social Security and Medicare. They’re workers who have to get up early tomorrow morning and go to work to pay the bills. They’re immigrants, who came here because they were stuck in poverty in countries where the government dominated the economy.”

Later, Rubio returned to the personal, noting that he had to foot his own college bills. “When I finished school, I owed over $100,000 in student loans, a debt I paid off just a few months ago,” he said.

And ,if he hadn’t gotten his point across, Rubio came back to his class identity toward the end of his remarks in a paean to Medicare.

“It provided my father the care he needed to battle cancer and ultimately die with dignity,” said Rubio of government health insurance for the elderly. “And it pays for the care my mother receives now. “